


Iconoclast/Orbitoclast

by FernDavant



Category: Class (TV 2016), Doctor Who
Genre: Angst, Bittersweet Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, F/F, F/M, Original Character(s), Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-08
Updated: 2016-11-08
Packaged: 2018-08-29 20:44:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8504749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FernDavant/pseuds/FernDavant
Summary: Quill wasn't always a soldier. And she's not a soldier now. Now she's just a slave to a bunch of Sixth Formers.





	

They are all in there, in the kitchen she shares with that snot-nosed excuse for a monarch. The little Junior Alien Hunting Squad. They are laughing and cavorting and whatever the adolescents of this planet do. Snogging and Snapchat, probably.

Quill has been doing her best to ignore this development, has locked herself in her room with half a tonne of chocolate and the Netflix password. It was bad enough when it was just the prince and the foreign one, but the whole lot of them are exceptionally noisy. And cheerful.

The worst of it is, it’s a Friday night, which means two more days of this. She can take the drudgery of the school—there’s a pattern to it, a systematic rhythm that she quite likes. And people at school fear her, and are forced to at least marginally respect her. It’s…pleasing. Familiar.

But weekends are unbearable. There is only so much time one can spend familiarizing oneself with internet memes. Purely for research purposes, of course.

Another loud outburst of laughter comes from the kitchen, and that is enough to bring Quill out of her reverie.

“Where are you going?” Charlie asks when she has crawled out of her room, a zombie leaving its crypt.

She can feel all the beady little human eyes focused on her as she slings her coat on. “Out.”

“Well,” Charlie begins hesitantly, unsure of what to say, but clearly reflecting on his responsibility for her (the fact that he _owns_ her, let’s be honest), “Don’t erm, get into trouble.”

“Yes, Master,” she spits, and slams the door behind her.

**

“I used to be a soldier, you know,” Quill says over the din of the music in the poorly lit club, to the man who has bought her a drink and is beginning to look like he regrets it.

“Like, in Afghanistan?” he asks, confused.

“Yeah, sure,” Quill replies. She has no clue what an Afghanistan is. Charlie probably knows. She might have asked him if she didn’t so wish for his death. Quill winces as the ahn in her brain registers its displeasure at that thought. “I used to be a soldier, and now I’m a slave to a bunch of Sixth Formers.”

“You’re a teacher, then?” the man ventures.

Quill looks at him appraisingly. He seems well-proportioned for a human. It’s so hard to tell, though. They are all of them so smooth and round and their skin tends to be so monochromatic. He likely had never killed a man either, more’s the pity. But she knows enough to know that she is, herself, attractive by human standards, and if this one has enough social confidence to try to engage her in ritualistic social libations leading to inebriation, then he was probably a what, 7 or 8 out of 10? And definitely rich, in this part of London, and with that watch.

“I’m still a soldier,” Quill grouses, slugging back the strange fruity drink the man has purchased for her, all in one go, “I’ve just been…temporarily diverted.”

The man nods in agreement, although his face still registers evident confusion. Quill finds it funny what humans will excuse for the potential to mate.

The man finally notes her finished drink, and then hazards, “Do you want to dance?”

“No,” Quill replies. “Do you want to fuck in the toilets?”

The man chokes on his drink. She’s evidently overstepped some sort of social bounds, but she doesn’t really care. She understands the desired end result of these social pleasantries. She isn’t willing to faff about.

“I, erm,” the man begins. “I wouldn’t be opposed to it?”

Such commitment.

“Good,” Quill says, standing up and finishing his drink for him. “Ladies or Gents?”

**

Gents it is, mostly because the man seemed slightly appalled at the idea of going into the Ladies’ room. He’d stick his dick in a woman, but not acknowledge the fact that they urinated. Whatever.

“Soldier is a bit of an undersell, honestly,” Quill says into the man’s neck, nipping at it. She likes the neck bits, she’s discovered. All sorts of lovely, flexing tendons in them.

“Mmmhmm,” the man replies distractedly, hiking up Quill’s skirt, rubbing their genitals together in a way that is acceptably pleasant.

“Warrior, really,” Quill adds breathlessly. A lie she tells herself. It’s so much nobler if the Quill are warriors. The Rhodians think them savages, so why not embody everything that’s good about the savage?

Yes, just another lie. Like the lie ‘this is going to be a satisfying sexual encounter.’

There is a bit of fumbling, but it seems the man has finally got his cock out. Quill’s slipped her pants off—skirts are such interesting inventions—and then they’re down to the business of penetration.

Angle’s all wrong, and the rhythm’s all off, and she did not walk all the way to this club not to come, so she slams the man down on the toilet, where she can set the pace, where she can get a nice bit of friction going.

“You better fucking last,” she murmurs into his hair.

“I will, I will,” he moans into her neck.

He fucking doesn’t, but he gives her a passable fingering. Beggars can’t be choosers, and what not.

**

She wasn’t always a soldier.

There. One of Quill’s deep, dark secrets. She wasn’t always a soldier, and the Quill haven’t always been a warrior race, but needs must.

On the Quill continent, on Rhodia, far away from little princelings, you fought. It would be trite to say that you fought or you died; perhaps more importantly, it would be inaccurate. You fought _and_ you, eventually, died. Bleak inevitability. (She wasn’t a pessimist—she just lived in a fucking dystopia, thank you very much).

And she wasn’t needlessly cruel. War was, on the whole, quite boring. It was good to have a hobby to distract yourself from. Might as well become a sadist, she had figured. If you’re good at war—and she was, she was very, very good at it—then you might as well enjoy it.

**

“What do you do?” the Doctor had asked her, both of them, while Charlie and her had been in the TARDIS, trying to pretend they weren’t in shock.

“I’m his slave,” Quill had sneered.

The Doctor had scowled, clearly viewing the ahn with as much distaste as Quill held, yet with not enough distaste to do anything about it, she noted. But he also waved his hand away. “Before that.”

“I’m a soldier,” Quill had replied, her eyes darting over to Charlie who was holding onto that stupid box like it was a security blanket, staring off into the middle distance, curled in on himself. She casually thought of 137 different ways to kill him. The ahn had protested as it usually did: painfully, swiftly, and likely by nibbling on a small chunk of her brain. She bit the inside of her cheek to hide her discomfort.

“People aren’t born soldiers,” the Doctor had said, eyes trailing from Quill to Charlie and back again, like he knew what she was thinking.

Quill hadn’t been able decide if she liked the Doctor or not. He had saved her, so that was a plus. And he was obviously highly competent, and she could respect that. But he was also fucking weird and averse to physical violence.

Meh. She was fucking weird, too. Maybe, since he had saved her life, she’d forgive his pacifism.

“Soldiers are made,” the Doctor had finished. “Believe me. I know.”

Quill had looked at the Doctor, the look in his eyes, and decided, abruptly, that she did like the Doctor. “I was a physicist. By training.”

“Oh,” the Doctor had said, nibbling on a finger in thought. “Can you teach?”

“I’ve led armies. That’s basically the same thing, isn’t it? Except these troops tend to be younger and moodier.”

The Doctor had shrugged, “Soldiers can teach, I think, in my experience. Good enough.”

**

Charlie’s filthy, pink, _human_ toe digs into the base of Quill’s spine as she sits on the tile floor of the bathroom they share, vomiting into the toilet.

“That’s disgusting,” Charlie sniffs, nose wrinkling at the smell of bile. “And Matteusz needs to use the loo. What happened to you?”

“I _partied._ And now I’m paying the consequences. You’re a teenager. You should try it sometime, you miserable wanker.”

Charlie sighs, “Please don’t call me a miserable wanker.”

“That an order or a request, sir?” Quill asks, levering herself up from the floor, swiping a hand across her mouth and flushing the toilet.

Charlie’s mouth twitches. She realizes, slowly, that he is suppressing a _snarl_. She has never been so proud.

“A request,” Charlie says finally.

“Alright, cumstain,” Quill huffs, walking out of the bathroom, shoulder checking Matteusz in the hallway.

**

That is perhaps the worst thing about the whole ahn situation: the way that Charlie treats the whole thing like some high moral imperative. She is his slave, but he at every turn tries to soften that context, and reframe the whole matter as him being a noble jailer helping to rehabilitate his wayward charge.

She could bear torture. She’s done it before. And being tortured shows a certain amount of respect, in a strange way. If you’re dangerous enough to beat and break, respected and feared enough to be physically oppressed, well, that’s a sort of compliment, isn’t it? If only she could be abused like a normal prisoner of war. But this do-gooder condescension she receives instead is absolutely maddening. And she can’t fight against it without looking like a petulant child, which is, likely, the goal of the whole pretense.

It’s, like, that thing. “The White Man’s Burden.” Yes. That one. She does a lot of reading of human literature, because she has nothing better to do, and because it is a less annoying way to understand them than using Google. And she has found that particular sentiment very familiar. Not Kipling’s best stuff, certainly. She prefers the one with the bear in it, although why the bear never ate the boy, she will never understand. Then again, it’s probably another metaphor. The bear probably needed colonizing or something.

Also, what _is_ a bear? And did they really have them in India?

**

“You are lonely, I think,” Matteusz says to her one day, apropros of not much.

“No, I’m not,” Quill sneers.

Matteusz shakes his head and gives her a sad smile. “As much as you will not admit it, you need some human companionship.”

Quill is absolutely furious at that comment. “Humans are the last sort of company that I want,” she spits.

**

Quill was never one for reminiscing. But only two beings in the universe remain who can remember her home planet, and it would be nice, if disgustingly sentimental, if she could talk about Rhodia with someone.

Charlie made the mistake, once, of broaching the subject, and Quill, not quite realizing what was happening, had ended up humoring him. But Charlie’s Rhodia bore very little resemblance to Quill’s. Charlie’s Rhodia had been palatial buildings, beautifully manicured gardens, and high-tech luxury vehicles.

Quill’s fondest memories were of the lower continent, when she was younger. Before things truly deteriorated. Before the Rhodians dug their grubby fingers into every aspect of Quill life. Still, it had been a far cry from privilege. Scrubland and prefabricated buildings. Scavenged tech and endless amounts of running and running because that’s how you got around. No luxury vehicles could last on that terrain.

Within five minutes, Quill had punched a hole in the wall of their flat, overwhelmed by some abstract feeling of anger and a rebel’s distaste for monarchy.

**

Seriously, fuck Britain.

God Save the Queen, indeed.

**

“I got Tindr,” Quill says to Matteusz, a few weeks after their completely unhelpful non-conversation about human companionship.

Matteusz offers her that same, infuriating, sad smile. “That is not what I meant.”

“Yeah, well, whatever.”

**

Swipe right on someone attractive.

Quill has begun a very serious, concerted effort to develop a ‘type.’ It is, from what she can tell, an expected thing. Charlie’s found a type, although it seems to boil down to ‘muscular and male.’

Surely, if the princeling can do it, she can. Squint at pictures of squishy looking people with a wide variety of flopping hairstyles. For hours. Discern some pattern to them that she finds aesthetically pleasing. Swipe. Fucking. Right.

After a while, if you just keep looking at them, human ears just start looking downright bizarre.

She gives up and just starts swiping right on people with cats in their picture.

**

“I’m just tired of the whole hookup culture, you know?” the woman with the calico cat says, nursing a cocktail that looks like it hosts its own house parties, because it’s just _that_ energetic. The woman is, probably, attractive—black curly hair, large round hazel eyes, dark brown skin. Nice smile—good white teeth, at least as far as human teeth go. Probably couldn’t rip a creature’s jugular out, but que sera sera.

“No,” Quill replies honestly. “I’m not tired of it. But whatever.”

“Oh,” the woman says, frowning slightly. “Well, then I’m not sure this is going to work out.”

“Oh,” Quill echoes back to her. She does not frown slightly. She was already frowning majorly, as she usually found herself doing when she was in places with high concentrations of human, so to also then frown slightly seems redundant. “Well, that’s a shame. Can I at least meet your cat?”

The woman looks at her with an expression on her face that Quill doesn’t recognize. “Is that a really mangled euphemism?”

“No? Why would it be?”

“I—“ the woman begins, then thinks better of it. “Never mind.”

“I want to meet your cat. It says here,” Quill begins, whipping out her phone, “that his name is Mr. Wilberforce, and I am very excited about the prospect of introducing myself.”

There’s a silence that Quill would classify as ‘uncomfortable.’

Finally, the other woman says with a shrug, “Alright, I’ve got nothing better to do.”

**

Eventually, Quill will learn that the woman’s name is Holly and that the cat likes to be scratched behind his right ear, and will let you run your hand from the top of his head to the base of his spine exactly 3 times before he bites you very hard on the hand. Quill can respect that.

Holly likes white wine and musicals. Mr. Wilberforce likes catnip mice and the destruction of upholstery.

They do not ‘hookup,’ but they do keep spending time together. And eat a lot of meals together. And eventually kiss a bit.

So. That’s an interesting development.

**

“Where have you been going?” Charlie asks. There’s a tone to his voice she doesn’t like. All imperious and slightly panicked. She wants to stab him. The ahn sends a sharp spike of pain through her pre-frontal cortex.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she replies, risking another bolt of pain running through her skull just for the pleasure of seeing Charlie begin to turn sort of red and tomato-y. These human bodies are so charming.

“You know what I mean,” Charlie says. “You’ve been gone almost every night this week.”

“So were you, all last week,” Quill points out quite sensibly, managing to keep all sarcasm out of her tone.

“Yes, well, it was Matteusz and I’s one month anniversary.” The prince’s face changes to something soft and, frankly, disgusting. Matteusz, who is sitting at the kitchen table with the two of them, eating a bowl of cereal at 11 at night, offers a sappy grin of his own, cheeks puffed up with grain-based crunchy things, a little bit of milk dribbling out of one of the corners of his mouth.

“How nice for you two,” Quill says.

“Don’t avoid the point,” Charlie snaps. “I need to know where you’ve been going.”

“Why?”

“It’s in my best interest to keep…track of what you’re doing. In case you—you know.” Charlie’s eyes are darting from Matteusz to Quill.

Matteusz isn’t smiling anymore.

“In case I’m plotting your murder?” Quill offers.

Charlie sighs. “Well, yes. I suppose.”

“I’ve been spending time with Holly.”

There’s silence. Matteusz and Charlie share a _look_. One of those inscrutable things that partners on this planet do that somehow conveys secret messages to each other. Quill wishes to crack the code on these things, of how it’s done, but hasn’t managed, so far.

“Who’s Holly?” Charlie asks.

“She is an acquaintance,” Quill replies.

Charlie is growing increasingly frustrated. “Yes, alright. But what are you doing with her? I _order_ you to tell me.”

Quill pauses just long enough to feel another sharp crack of pain. It’s the little things that make life worthwhile. The pain of your brain being gnawed on by a creepy little creature that make you feel alive, defiant, with still a _hint_ of autonomy. Free to choose how and when your brain gets eaten. “We eat a lot of meals together. I play with her cat. Last Tuesday we went to this thing called a ‘musical,’ which is a strange little human form of entertainment, where everyone attempts to solve their problems via song. It’s disconcerting, yet strangely catchy—“

“Yes, but—“ Charlie begins.

But a touch on his arm from Matteusz silences him. “Is she…is this Holly your _girlfriend?”_

Quill is about to laugh in Matteusz’s face, when she pauses and reflects. She should know better. She should _never_ pause and reflect. Quill pulls a horrified face: “Oh, shit. I think she might be.”

Matteusz puts the spoon down, cereal forgotten, and places his chin in his hands. “Did you meet her on Tindr?”

“Yes,” Quill admits.

“And she has a cat, did you say? What is the cat’s name?”

“Mr. Wilberforce,” Quill answers, horrified to find that she’s smiling, and Matteusz is smiling, and is this that ‘small talk’ she’s heard so much about?

“That is a delightful name,” Matteusz says. “And what musical did you go see? I love musicals! I wish Charlie would take me, but he says they are too expensive, even though you have literally infinite money from that Doctor.”

“I don’t—“ Charlie begins, stuttering ineffectively, “Ostentatious spending could attract the attention of the wrong sorts of people! And that’s beside the point. Are you and Holly planning on harming me in any way?”

“Charlie,” Matteusz says, frowning, “You want me to tell you these things, so I will. Right now, you are being a very big arsehole.”

Charlie has the good sense to blush. He turns to Matteusz and says, “I am sorry.”

“Not who you should be apologizing too,” Matteusz says with a shake of his head.

Quill sees a muscle in Charlie’s cheek twitch, but is shocked to find he turns to her anyway. “I am sorry. I was being…overly concerned.”

Quill looks at him like he’s grown a second head.

“You can accept his apology or not,” Matteusz says, nudging Quill. “But I think it would be best to thank him either way.”

“Thank you,” Quill says automatically, wondering what kind of training Matteusz has in diplomacy, manipulation, or whatever else. The young man has some truly scary powers. “Apology not accepted.”

Charlie bites his lip.

“Is fair,” Matteusz reminds him. “She doesn’t have to accept.”

“Right,” Charlie says finally, standing up. “This all feels terribly awkward. I’m going to our room to pretend this hasn’t happened. I’ll see you later, Matteusz.”

“Night, night,” Matteusz offers cheerfully, before turning back to Quill. “So, what musical _was_ it?”

“ _Les Miserables_. Human revolutions seem to require a lot of singing and choreography.”

**

“Are we girlfriends?” Quill asks the next time she sees Holly.

Holly raises an eyebrow. “Do you want us to be?”

This feels dangerous. Quill knows how to defuse simple bombs, lead a charge at an enemy trench, and infiltrate and take down an enemy base. She’s also well-versed in multi-dimensional physics, hydrolial planes, and after a Buzzfeed article, how to make s’mores. This, however, she has no experience with.

On Rhodia, Quill didn’t have close friends. Earlier in life, she had been on close terms with her family, for a certain definition of ‘close,’ but they hadn’t agreed with her politics, so she had left them behind. If they wanted to die under Rhodian rule, so be it.

She had a Cause. She had people who reported to her. There was a comraderie associated with all of that, something that was pleasant, but nothing like these disgusting, deep emotional entanglements that humans, particularly adolescent humans, seemed to jump into so eagerly.

And as for lovers, well. If you found someone attractive, and they found you attractive, then what the hell, start a sexual relationship. The two of you were probably going to die at an exceptionally young age, either in the camps or on a mission, bombed or stabbed or shot. Only a fool would bring a pup into that sort of world, so that wasn’t really a choice either. All easy, as long as you kept emotional involvement at a minimum, and Quill had always excelled at that.

She wasn’t lonely. She really, really wasn’t lonely. And she wasn’t weak. And she wasn’t human.

She feels none of those things, and none of those things factor into her decision. Absolutely not.

“I think we are,” Quill says finally.

Holly gives a smile, dark curls bouncing around her face like a halo. “Then we’re girlfriends.”

“That’s satisfactory,” Quill says with a nod.

Holly laughs and kisses her.

**

So _now_ , it seems, they can engage in sexual relations.

Well, that’s a definite plus.

**

It’s weird having sex with feelings.

Quill doesn’t feel things, obviously. Other than, you know, orgasm. She doesn’t feel _emotions_.

But Holly clearly does.

The first time Holly _laughed_ while they were having sex, Quill thought she was malfunctioning.

“What are you laughing at?” Quill had asked, jumping off the other woman like she’d been shocked.

“Nothing,” Holly had replied, evidently as confused as Quill. “I’m just…happy.”

“Well, stop it,” Quill had demanded.

Holly had raised any eyebrow at her, sat up on her knees, and then proceeded to push Quill down onto her back, straddling her, and completely reversing their previous positions in a way Quill had found infuriating.

And slightly arousing.

And intriguing.

But mostly infuriating.

“Nope,” Holly had said, defiantly. “I have a better idea. How about I make you happy too, and then we can be happy together.”

“Sounds terrible,” Quill had said. Or well, she had actually squeaked, but she wouldn’t reveal that except on pain of torture. But had been perfectly within her rights to squeak, what with the soft, sweet mouth closing around one of her nipples, trailing kisses down her stomach, humming pleasantly.

“I refuse to giggle,” Quill had said, squirming against Holly’s mouth.

Holly _had_ giggled, and mumbled, “Screaming my name is also acceptable, then.”

**

The Doctor had been annoyingly overenthusiastic about helping them choose human aliases. He had dictionaries full of human names, indexed by phonemes so that she and Charlie could choose aliases.

Prince Char ai elea of House Nubzathar something something, oh what bollocks, had found a name happily and quickly, but was frowning over surnames, while Quill had just sat, idly flicking through the name dictionary, staring off into the middle distance.

She had a name, of course. First name, then clan name, like all Quill. But you sort of tended to lose all that when you were a freedom fighter. It’d been a long time since anyone had called her anything other than Commander, or one of the villainous epithets the Rhodian propaganda minister had bestowed upon her.

There were big signs of her, all over the occupied zones of the Quill continent and in all the major cities of Rhodia, the most unflattering photo of her they could find, in 3D if the place was posh enough, the bounty on her head included, and the only name most anyone knew her by anymore.

‘The Corrupter,’ in Quill. Which was, Quill thought, a shame, because the name they had given her, in Rhodian, was frankly _much_ cooler. It translated literally to ‘She Who Takes All that Is Just and Makes It Unjust.’

And that was _beautiful_. Because Rhodians did not have words for good and bad. Instead they used the words ‘at peace’ and ‘at war,’ or, ‘just’ or ‘unjust.’ And they couldn’t call her ‘The Maker of War,’ or whatever. That would be _redundant_. Because it was, of course, just a simple fact of life that all Quill were war-like and savage and miserable. So to say that she made all that was ‘just,’ ‘unjust?’ That gave her a sort of power. Made her a thing to really be feared.

A closer, more flattering, literal translation would have been ‘She Who Upturns Our Entire Social Order.’ But some propaganda minister somewhere probably thought he was being _pithy_ by just making her ‘The Corrupter.’

She had often fantasized about finding that minister and gutting him.

“Smith is a good surname,” the Doctor had been saying with a grin, when Quill had finally left her own thoughts and checked back in to the present conversation. “And how are you coming along, then?”

“I have a surname,” Quill had replied suddenly, impulsively. “I’ve picked one out.”

“Good,” the Doctor had said, then waited expectantly for something, really quite impressive eyebrows doing lots of really quite impressive things.

Quill had blinked at him.

“What _is_ the surname?” the Doctor had asked finally.

“Oh,” Quill had said. “It’s Quill.”

“Your surname can’t be ‘Quill.’ That’s absurd,” the little high-handed shitheel had said. “That would be like if my surname was ‘Rhodian.’”

Quill had done an impressive job of keeping her tone even, if she did say so herself. “You have your little box to remember your people by. Your people, I might add, who have taken so much from mine. Can you not, for a moment, allow me this one thing?”

Charlie had opened and closed his mouth, then decided better of speaking with Quill. (Why should the master degrade himself by conversing with the slave?) Instead, he had deferred to the Doctor. “Is Quill an acceptable human surname?”

“It’s a perfectly cromulent surname,” the Doctor had replied with a shrug. “Tell me when you’ve picked the first name. I’ll start making the documents, but I’ll leave that bit blank.”

Quill had nodded primly, and then, on impulse, she genuinely, actually looked up the phoneme of her first name.

**

“Andrea?” Holly says, snapping her fingers. “Everything alright? You’re miles away.”

“We are _cuddling_. There is literally no space separating our bodies.”

“That was—that was an expression. It seemed like your _thoughts_ were miles away.”

It is weird being called Andrea. It is weird being cuddled.

And her thoughts, honestly, _were_ miles away. Different galaxy. Different planet. Whole different paradigm.

It is weird that this woman puts up with her, she reflects. She put up with her before they were having sex, so it’s not some puerile human lust thing. This woman, absurdly, probably genuinely likes her.

What is _wrong_ with humans?

And what is wrong with Quill, for that matter? Because she is growing increasingly anxious about the fact that she keeps lying to Holly, lying a frankly absurd amount. She knows where Holly studied, what Holly does for work (reference librarian, whatever that is), about Holly’s family and older brother. Holly’s taste in food and music and entertainment in general.

And Holly knows what about her, exactly?

Quite a lot about Quill’s taste in literature and most frequented websites, as that’s how Quill spends much of her free time, and thus a topic of eager conversation for her. A bit about Quill’s Netflix streaming preferences, although ‘Netflix and chill’ turned out to have a meaning Quill could not have predicted. All about her complaints with regards to her job, the normal parts of it, the teaching and the students who refuse to learn. A bit about her frustration with Charlie, who is, nominally, her ‘ward.’ A bit about his marginally less infuriating boyfriend, and a bit about their little squad. And Holly knows, vaguely, that Quill fought in a war, that Quill has more than a passing fondness for violence, but has put much of that behind her. She doesn’t know that she’s only put that behind her because a brain parasite literally prevents her from engaging in acts of violence, but there you are.

But mixed in with all that is a bunch of other lies. A list of things she made up completely about Sheffield, although she keeps meaning to visit to make her stories more convincing. And nothing about her past or her family.

Or, you know. The fact that she’s an alien.

“Relationships are built on honesty and hard work,” Matteusz had said to her late one night.

Apparently, they did that now, staying up late, him eating just a frankly ridiculous amount of cereal, her gnawing endlessly on chocolate, and both of them talking. Quill sort of zoned out when Matteusz wasn’t talking about her or her life, but their talks were a decent approximation of friendly chats, nonetheless.

“What is your definition of ‘hard work’ in that sentence?” Quill had asked, for clarification, because generally, in her experience with relationships, that meant ‘physical violence’ and/or ‘revolution.’

“Emotional empathy,” Matteusz had replied. “Considered interpersonal discussion. Compromise.”

“Oh,” Quill had frowned. “Bollocks.”

Now, Quill is thinking back to this conversation, spooned up against Holly on Holly’s couch, watching a movie where a bunch of teenagers are systematically slaughtered by some mysterious killer. Wish fulfillment film, basically.

Or Holly was watching the movie, and Quill’s mind had gone walkabout.

Thankfully, Mr. Wilberforce has the good sense to interrupt them by walking across both their bodies, making sure to step on every joint and sensitive spot on the way, before stopping in front of their heads and proudly presenting his butthole to them, purring loudly.

“Yes, yes, nice arsehole, Mister,” Holly laughs, picking him up and placing him on the armrest of the couch.

Quill sits up, digs around under the couch, finds a cat toy and dangles it in front of Mr. Wilberforce’s adorable fluffy face.

“You gonna tell me what’s up with you?” Holly asks, watching cat and woman engage in a contest of wills—Quill holding the toy just within and then just out of Mr. Wilberforce’s reach, smug because she has jointed thumbs with which she can hold tools, while he, is a cat.

Quill is silent for a bit, until Mr. Wilberforce digs his claws into both the toy, and her weird, fleshy human thumb. They both hiss at each other, then Mr. Wilberforce takes his toy to his small hidden den behind the refrigerator. Both are pleased with how this interaction went down.

“Why do you like me?” Quill asks finally, studiously avoiding eye contact.

Holly laughs.

Quill bristles. Holly doesn’t seem to notice Quill’s discomfort, cannot possibly realize what it means to Quill to be laughed at, how it makes her think of sneering occupying forces with rifles bigger than she is, ready to ram the butt of those into her face if she dares to even look at them. How it makes her think of the supercilious face of a young prince, self-righteous in his belief that he is doing what is _right._

It is better that she doesn’t know these things, possibly.

“I like you,” Holly says finally, the smile and the trace of her laughter dying from her face when she sees Quill’s displeased, almost hurt, look, “because you’re weird. And funny. And there is not a single person you aren’t capable of insulting in the most hilarious way. You don’t care what people think. You love reading, and you have…interesting opinions about literature. You love cats, which is, let’s be frank, like 90% of what I look for in a partner already. And you’d never admit this, and you’re probably going to make that appalled face, but you’re…you need someone. It’s nice to be needed. Bit selfish, but nice.”

Quill does, indeed, make that appalled face. “I am completely self-sufficient. I do all my own grocery shopping.”

“Your ability to go to the shops or even brush your teeth or whatever has nothing to do with what I’m talking about and you _know_ it,” Holly says. She’s surprisingly good at not taking shit from Quill. For a human. “You’re lonely.”

“I am not.”

“Not now, thanks to my wonderful self,” Holly grins, nudging up against Quill playfully. “But you were. You know, it’s okay to be lonely. And it’s okay to need people.”

Quill ignores this. Holly is wrong, but a certain amount of that is to be expected from humans. “You don’t think it’s odd that I know way more about you than you know about me?”

“Well, I didn’t,” Holly says with a shrug. “Although, now you’ve got me worrying a bit. But we have known each other for all of a month and a half. Relax. It’s not a competition; it’s a relationship. You’ll tell me when you tell me. Now, if we’ve been going out for like two years and I still don’t know anything about you, that’s when there’s a problem.”

Quill frowns, mostly because she’s good at frowning. “Alright.”

“Now,” Holly says, tilting her head, deciding that Quill is, after all, alright. “Do you want to watch another movie?”

“Will there be popcorn?” Quill asks.

“If you get up off your arse and make it, there will,” Holly says, punching Quill on the arm, far more gently than Quill would prefer, but it’s the thought that counts.

(Quill really likes popcorn. Salt, like chocolate, is a _gift_.)

**

“How did you find us?” Quill hisses, beyond angry and moving into apoplectic, staring at the faces of the Spooky Alien Defense Force or whatever-the-fuck they are.

“Instagram geotags everything, if you know where to look,” Tanya says, somewhat proudly.

“I don’t have an Instagram,” Quill snaps.

“Erm,” Holly begins quietly, slightly embarrassed, “look, the plating was really exquisite, and I don’t usually do the whole ‘food picture’ thing, but, this is a really nice restaurant.”

“How do you know my girlfriend’s Instagram account?” Quill bellows, being forgiving, for once, about someone’s social media transgressions.

“I told her,” Matteusz says, chin jutting out in a way that indicates he will not quail in front of her, no matter what she does. “It was emergency.”

“Was it?” Quill asks, whirling around on Matteusz, prepared to test just how far his unflappability will stretch. “Was it really? Because I don’t see any alien invasions or monster tattoos or huge fucking swords appearing in a puff of smoke in Miss MaClean’s hands and—“

And that’s when a pack of terrible looking monsters bursts through the glass front of the really quite posh restaurant Quill had taken her girlfriend to.

“Oh,” Quill sighs. “Well. That would be the alien invasion, wouldn’t it?”

“Aliens are so inconvenient. They never arrive when you want you expect ‘em,” Ram says with a grin.

“What the hell is going on?” Holly asks. At least she’s not screaming. Almost all the other patrons are screaming hysterically, it seems. “Why is everyone alright with this?”

“We are not alright,” Charlie says. “We have just developed coping mechanisms.”

“And you decided to just stalk me, while I was on a date?” Quill asks.

“You’re our designated adult,” Ram points out. He’s grabbed a chair and is squaring off against one of the monsters. The boy seems convinced that chairs are legitimate weapons. He’s a promising warrior, but the chair obsession is a troubling pattern that shows an inability to really grasp the concept of improvised weapons.

“Plus, you’re bound to protect me, need I remind you!” Charlie shouts.

“You never need to remind me,” Quill growls. But she’s unable to hide a little charge of excitement over the fact that she gets to fight weird abominations in single combat. Probably punch them in the face, even!

And then excitement turns to a feeling that Quill finds unfamiliar: dread. Because the abominable hellbeasts are engaged in a feeding frenzy in the restaurant. And one of them has headed directly for Holly.

And now Holly is screaming, which, you know, fair enough. Quill would prefer, in general, a mate who didn’t scream in the face of danger, but when it’s one’s first time facing down death, some allowances should be made, and Quill has a feeling that Holly doesn’t see much combat as a reference librarian.

And so, Quill goes charging at some manner of alien with claws as long as her entire hand, completely ready to throw herself at 7 feet of caustic, nasty smelling flesh, when she feels it.

She knows it before he says anything. Or rather, the ahn knows it before he says anything, and it digs its filthy little pincers into the soft tissue of her brain. She’s propelled forward by her own momentum, towards Holly and Holly’s own personal hellbeast, but her neck snaps to look ‘round and spot Charlie, who has fallen on his back, tripped over a chair, panic-stricken, as one of the creatures charges towards him. Matteusz has grabbed Charlie’s hand, trying to pull him up, drag him away, yet simultaneously put his own body between Charlie’s and the creature’s. But to the ahn, that’s not enough. Nice try, but it doesn’t give partial credit in these things. It wants Quill to be more proactive in protecting her slave-driver.

“Andrea!” Holly shouts.

“Quill!” Charlie chokes out.

And normally, normally, she likes being called Quill. Of course she is Quill. She is the _only_ Quill. She is what is left, and she has fought body and soul for her people. It is an _honor_ to hold their name now, because their _name_ is all she can hold.

But _he_ doesn’t say it like that. _He_ doesn’t mean it like that. Quill means, and has always meant to him and his kind, ‘slave.’

And suddenly, the strange human approximation of her real name, her given name, sounds a lot nicer to her ears.

How long does it take for a parasite to decide that you’re not protecting your master sufficiently and inject neurotoxin into your brain, killing you? Momentum is already propelling her in the direction of Holly, so surely the ahn won’t fault her for adhering to the basic laws of gravity. Will it give her 5, maybe 10 seconds to land on the creature, attack it sufficiently to taunt it, then run back to Charlie and try to take on both creatures at once? Hopefully give Holly enough time to do what most humans do best, and run, saving their own skin?

First second. Land on monster of indeterminate origin. So far so good. Pain at a minimal twinge, a superficial reminder that she has something she must be doing.

Seconds 2-5, shout incomprehensibly at monster, while rending flesh as far as inferior human claws can manage. Pain level building precipitously. Surpassing migraine levels. Worrying artifacts appearing in her vision.

Seconds 6 and 7. Monster has shaken her off with disappointing ease, now far more interested in the prone victim in front of it than in the shout-y tearing thing that has tackled it. It might be possibly psychosomatic, but Quill is finding it increasingly hard to breathe. Higher motor functions seem to be impaired, as well. She stumbles, more than lunges, back at the creature.

Second 8. She’s not really sure what happens in second 8. She’s dying, probably. Her vision popping in and out of focus, hands reaching blindly, falling, face first. She thinks she has Holly’s hand. Maybe. The noise of the restaurant has faded into the background, and there’s nothing but this horrible ringing in her ears.

**

And she will not die like this. Like a rabid dog, put down because it snapped at its owner. She will live, and she will find a way to remove the ahn, and she will do this thing that humans used to do, to Charlie, to show him what it’s like.

Lobotomy. That’s it.

**

She turns towards Charlie, and between that, and her obvious intent to save him (at least, for now), the ahn lets up, and she can breathe again. She charges at the monster on Charlie, now, goes for a different tactic, and roundhouse kicks it in what looks, roughly, like its face. It’s got a lot of teeth there, anyway, and holes that look like eyes. Well, eyes were made for gouging, so that’s just what she’ll do, with one hand at least. Grab onto something roughly throat-like as well, constrict it. Knee to the torso of the thing, for good measure. She throws all her weight behind her, and slams both herself, and the monster to the ground.

Alright, it’s less a slam, and more a calculated fall. But she has the thing grappled, so it’s a win-win. Out of the corner of her eye, she catches a brief glimpse of Ram and April hurrying towards Holly. April’s got her Spirit Swords, Ram his trusty chair. So. That’s nice of them.

Quill, meanwhile, has her hands full. The monster digs its claws into her side, and there’s a perfectly nice frock ruined. Dry-clean only. Absolutely no monsters.

Quill decides that the monster’s eyes are well and truly gouged, and removes her hand to grab at the claw in her side. The monster gets a parting bite out of this, snapping into the fleshy part of her palm, and well, she probably needs that to make the thumb work, but she’ll deal with that later.

She somehow, with quite a deal of pain, gets the monster’s claws out of her flesh, and then focuses on the very important work of slamming the thing’s head down against the floor, repeatedly, until there’s a nice crunching noise, or it stops moving, or brain matter oozes out the back of its lumpy, misshapen head, or, ideally, all three.

She’d like it, she really would, if she could use something more than her hands. What kind of bodyguard is one who cannot use a weapon? A sham one. A slave set up to die in a way that offers plausible deniability, that lets the Rhodians think that they are being kind. Rhodians are too civilized for a death penalty, but they are just civilized enough for rules-lawyering and self-righteousness. All part of the rehabilitation!

Well, she’s going to rehabilitate this creature’s skull into this ludicrously patterned tile floor, if it’s the last thing she’ll ever do.

**

Eventually, Tanya does something clever, hacks a hole through the universe or whatever, and sucks all the monsters left alive in the restaurant back into ye olde time bunghole, and that’s it. That’s 5 monsters left alive, incidentally. With three dead at Quill’s hand and two at the duo that is Chair Boy and Scimitar Girl. 50% mortality rate for the other side’s combatants. A good day.

Matteusz had helped the restaurant goers escaped, and Charlie had mostly been useless, as was his way.

Quill is occupying herself with the very important task of staring off into the middle distance, letting her mind go blank from the combined rush of battle and the sharp pain in her side that blots all other thoughts out.

When April comes up and touches her gently on the shoulder, she almost punches the girl in the face.

“She’s alive,” April says to Quill’s back.

“Who?” asks Quill.

“Your-your girlfriend. Holly? The monster knocked her out, but Ram and I, we got it away from her before any real harm could be done. I mean, she might have brain trauma, but she seems stable. Charlie’s called the paramedics, and they’ll take her and the others who were hurt to hospital. You can probably ride with her if you want. I think that’s a thing paramedics do,” April pauses, ceasing her incessant verbal diarrhea, and noticing, for the first time, Quill’s side. “Or—or you could go to hospital for yourself.”

“I’m fine,” Quill says. She’s had worse. Will likely have worse again.

“You’re bleeding from deep puncture wounds,” April huffs in protest.

Quill spins around and huffs right back at her. “What are you, some kind of genius now? I thought that was the pathetic young nerd’s job.”

April gasps when she gets a look at Quill’s face.

Quill frowns. “What?”

April, wordlessly, pulls out her phone, hands it to her, screen out, selfie cam on.

It takes Quill a moment to realize that the face she’s looking at is hers. It’s the little jolt of dissonance she gets every day when she wakes up and looks in the mirror. _What is that disgusting creature? Oh, yeah. It’s me, now._

Same eyes, though. She always recognizes her own eyes. Or she would usually, but now they’re bloodshot. Tear stained. She has, it appears, been crying blood. Blood dripping from her nose too, and—if she just turns her head—yes, a trickle of blood from those weird human ears.

“Ah, yes,” Quill says, wiping at her eyes, because tears are so emotional and undignified and human. “That would be my brain matter leaking out. I didn’t react quickly enough to the ahn. Lucky to be alive, frankly.”

Quill shrugs and turns away from April, who is still staring at her, mutely, faintly horrified. It’s rather amusing. Quill tosses the phone back to April carelessly. April fails to drop it. It breaks, and April swears. Quill chuckles; it’s the little things that keep her going.

She walks out of the restaurant, into the night air, bloodied, clutching at her sticky, still bleeding side.

“Where are you going?” asks the last being in the universe that she would ever talk to.

“Fuck off, Chuckie,” Quill replies.

Tanya gasps at an adult swearing. She really is so painfully young. They all are. If she thinks about it too much, she’ll have serious misgivings about all of this, so best not.

Quill walks off down the street and into the night.

**

There’s enough left of the gun, and enough other extraterrestrial bits and bobs left around for Quill to construct a basic dermal regenerator, even if she has to do it basically one handed. It clears the puncture wounds right up, and stops any bleeding in her brain. There’s probably some permanent brain damage, but she wasn’t using all of her brain anyway on this miserable rock, so likely no one will notice the difference. Sure, she might discover later she’s not be able to taste umami or recognize the color fuchsia, but she’ll cross that bridge when she’s completely incapable of recognizing it as a bridge.

By the time the boys return to the flat, Quill is sitting in the pitch dark of the sitting room wearing a slip, her body in one piece, albeit completely stinking drunk. There is a bottle of vodka empty on the table next to her.

Charlie and Matteusz are clinging to each other, looking vaguely traumatized.

Charlie does a doubletake when he spots her. Matteusz jumps from surprise.

“You’re…healed,” Charlie says.

“I can take care of myself, Prince. And you. And not much anyone else.”

Charlie bites the inside of his lip. “I _am_ sorry about that. It was unfortunate that the ahn made it so you couldn’t…”

Charlie has the good sense to trail off and not finish that sentence. Because if he had, she might have thrown the vodka bottle at him, ahn be damned.

“I am glad you survived,” Matteusz says cheerfully, sincerely.

“Yes, well, that makes one of us,” Quill replies.

The two boys both frown at her from the hallway for a bit longer. It is immensely uncomfortable.

“This is immensely uncomfortable,” Charlie says at last. “I’m going to bed. I am—I am truly sorry, you know. Whether you believe it or not.”

Charlie heads upstairs. Matteusz offers her a little wave, then follows him up.

Quill sits alone in the dark, contemplating whether another bottle of vodka would give her fatal alcohol poisoning, and whether or not she cares if it would.

**

Three weeks later, Quill is walking home from school, distracted as she approaches the flat, digging for her keys absentmindedly.

When she finally finds her keys, she cannot unlock the door. There is someone sitting on her step.

“You’re avoiding me,” Holly says.

She looks very not dead. Quill is pleased in a detached, sort of abstract way.

“You’re in my way.”

“Why are you avoiding me?” Holly asks. She gives no sign that she’s moving. “We have a lot to talk about.”

“You are incorrect. We have nothing to talk about.”

“We are girlfriends. We went through a mutual traumatic experience. And I know I had brain trauma, but I’m also fairly sure that there were aliens, your teenaged students fight aliens, and I think you, yourself, might be an alien. I’m entitled to some answers.”

“Stop talking so loudly in the middle of the street about mad things,” Quill hushes. “Get off the step, and we’ll talk inside.”

Holly hesitates. “I don’t put it past you to just shove me out of the way, rush into your flat, and shut the door.”

“I won’t do that.”

“Promise me?” Holly asks, eyes wide.

“Yes, I promise,” Quill says with as much sincerity as she has within her.

Holly gets up, and Quill shoves her out of the way, rushes into her flat, and shuts the door.

Turns out Quill didn’t have very much sincerity in her.

Quill leans against the door for a minute and a half, breathing slowly in and out, counting each second. Then she opens the door again to find Holly still standing on her step, arms folded, expression severely unamused.

Quill huffs, opens the door wider. “Come in, then.”

Quill stalks into the kitchen, getting out the chocolate and the vodka, and trusting that Holly is following. After she’s got a shot and a square of chocolate into her, she says, without preamble, “I’m an alien. Charlie’s an alien. I am enslaved to him as punishment for war crimes I committed. Everyone else on our planet is dead. There’s a giant rift in time and space at the school I work at, because reasons. A famous warrior-cum-hobo-cum-intergalactic-travelling-alien-hero saved Charlie and I from the massacre of our planet, but also charged all of the students you saw at the restaurant with guarding against the time-space-rift. I believe that some of the juveniles have taken to calling it a ‘bunghole.’ Good talk? Good talk. Vacate my flat.”

Holly, stubbornly, doesn’t leave, because Holly is the kind of person Quill would enter into a relationship with, and thus, really impressively stubborn. “Okay. I’m confused. I’m really, really confused, on a lot of levels. But, funnily enough, the thing that confuses me the most, is that you and I had a pretty solid relationship going, then we have a-a-what? A near death experience together? And then you completely cut me off. What does that tell you?”

“It tells me that you have very strange priorities.”

“No,” Holly shouts, slamming her palm down on the kitchen table. “You don’t get to do this. I deserve answers.”

“No one deserves anything,” Quill shouts back, getting up from the kitchen table, and spinning off into the kitchen, turning her back from Holly, examining, instead, the sleek ultra-modern design of this stupid flat’s kitchen.

And then she spots the knife set, complete with kitchen scissors (and what _are_ kitchen scissors? Are they different from scissors, scissors? She just doesn’t know). And she has an idea. If the ahn will co-operate. But it should, it just about should.

She spins around. Kitchen scissors in hand. Not a weapon, really. Or at least only as much of a weapon as a stapler. And she doesn’t really want to hurt Holly, and intent matters with the ahn. “I said get out of my flat.”

Holly raises an eyebrow, but doesn’t flinch. “No, don’t try that on with me.”

“Did you not hear the part about the war crimes?” Quill asks rhetorically, striding forward towards Holly, slowly, with as much intimidation in her step as she can muster. “Shall I repeat it? Before I cut off your weird human ears, of course, because, otherwise, it’ll be a bit pointless.”

Holly’s a bit uncertain now, gnawing at her lower lip. “I know you—“

“You _really_ don’t,” Quill drawls.

“You’re always trying to drive people away, but the real you—“

“Has literal quills, actually. Claws and fangs too. This form is so boring and weak. Compromise is a bitch.”

“Why would you go through this whole façade? A whole relationship? The vulnerability? Why would you go through all this to just suddenly now claim you want to murder me or something?”

“I told you,” Quill says, twirling the scissors in a way she hopes is both jaunty and threatening. “I wanted to meet your cat.”

Holly stares at her, then laughs rather hysterically. “You’re telling me you only did this for my cat?”

“The sex was nice too, once it started. And getting out of this miserable cage, out from under _his_ thumb, that was a bonus. But no, mostly the cat. At least 90%.”

Holly is still uncertain, but Quill can see the growing doubt in her eyes. “You’d do all this for a cat?”

“Alien. Different priorities.” A shrug. “Cats are by far the most interesting species on this planet, but the lease of this flat doesn’t let us have pets.”

Holly continues to bite at her lip. “Then why stop the whole thing now? So suddenly?”

“Because you’re a liability,” Quill sneers. “You almost got me killed in the restaurant, just because you wanted a food selfie. And because of your complete, human inability to protect yourself. The way you screamed like a small child? Pathetic. You’re just not worth it anymore. I’ll find another person. Another cat. I’m sure Mr. Wilberforce will understand.”

“Well, I don’t!” Holly protests, standing up, invading Quill’s space. “I don’t understand.”

Bit tricky this bit, but she should be able to manage. She pushes Holly against the wall, not full strength, in a way not dissimilar to a move she’s pulled during sex before, so she knows she can get away with it.

This time she’s got scissors buried into the wall next to Holly’s head, though. Never done that bit during sex.

Quill stares at Holly menacingly until Holly’s eyes dart away. Until she sees what she wants in Holly’s eyes: fear.

Quill speaks quietly enough so that the other woman has to strain to hear it. Make them come to you. Make them _fear_ you. “Get out of my flat before I’m tempted to show you what I did to traitors. In case you want a concrete definition of war crimes.”

Quill shoves Holly away then. That was probably too far. The ahn sends a shock of bright pain through her brain, enough to make her stumble. Holly doesn’t notice, though. She’s too busy running out of the flat.

Charlie shows up a few minutes later, spots the scissors buried into the wall, and shoots a bewildered look at Quill.

“Kitchen mishap,” Quill lies, giving Charlie a positively feral grin.

**

Incidentally, what she did with traitors was lock them up, keep them in isolation and in the dark about current plans and movements, then dump them at the nearest settlement when the rebel forces broke camp and moved on.

The Rhodians killed too many Quill for her to so lightly spill her own people’s blood.

Besides, Quill could be cruel enough to the Rhodians to scare most of the others who served under her away from doing anything so stupid as betraying her.

**

Here is how the human practice of lobotomy is performed, at least in the form that results in the least fatalities:

A person is put under general anesthesia. A surgeon comes in with a tool and a hammer. It is a common misconception that lobotomies are performed with an icepick; in actuality a specialized tool known as an ‘orbitoclast’ is used, a tool that is strong, like an icepick, but also has a loop at the top, which allows the surgeon to sever white matter from the rest of the brain, a key step in the lobotomy.

The orbitoclast is inserted through the patient’s orbital socket, and then, with a swift tap to its end with a hammer, bang, the surgeon is in the patient’s brain. The surgeon then spins the orbitoclast, which severs white matter connections from grey matter connections in the brain, severing connections between the prefrontal cortex and the rest of the brain.

The orbitoclast is then removed. The process is repeated in the orbital socket of the other eye.

The whole thing can be completed in 10 minutes.

On average, the whole procedure renders a human docile, dependent, incapable of higher thought, with little initiative or inhibition. For the unlucky, it is completely incapacitating.

Quill looks into the mirror, past the human face that is so hard to recognize as her own, and into her more familiar eyes. She probes, delicately, with one finger, right above her left eye, finger tracing the outline of the orbital socket, pressing just past it, above her eye, the gap between eye and socket, the little bit of skin and bone between skull and brain.

There is a thing that lives in her prefrontal cortex. A thing that prevents her from being—well, not human. Lots of things prevent her from being human, and she wouldn’t really want to be human, would she? Disgusting.

But the thing, well, it keeps her from being a _person_.

What would happen, she wonders, if that strong, sturdy tool, with its loop on top, slid up past her eye socket, and up, into her brain? What would happen if grey matter was torn from white matter? What would the ahn do then?

Or perhaps, she thinks bitterly, nothing would change.

She has already been lobotomized. Docile. Dependent.

Not for long, though. Never for long.

She has fought against so many other things, she has lived when she should have died, time and time again, and she refuses to let this stop her.

Not for long.

 


End file.
